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My director’s philosophy is that everyone should be able to most of the department’s tasks to have an evenly workload and for cross coverage. We are pharmacists and have basically three areas: review of patient medication profiles (40%), review patient claims’ histories (40%), and drug information (20%).

The thing is three of the pharmacists loathe/are uncomfortable with the drug information portion of the job, but are high performers of the other 80%. The other three are comfortable with all areas.

Would it be a good idea to specialize half of the team to review patient medication profiles and review patient claims’ histories, while the other half increase their portion of drug information and decrease their tasks in the other two areas? In other words, play to their strengths. My director was open to this idea when I proposed it. Thanks in advance.

ashdenver's picture

In my office (the actual physical location) we always operated as generalists while other locations (that were MUCH larger) were able to afford the luxury of being specialized.  Now that we've combined forces, the higher-ups are seeing that the specialty groups aren't working as well as they might have hoped and are starting to shift back to cross-training and generalist approaches. 

Within the generalist approach, we've still had areas of specialty and generally play to those strengths.  Personally, I may loathe dealing with B.  I can do B but I prefer A.  Whenever and wherever possible, they'll give me A (because they know I can knock them out of the park & do a damn fine job at it) but when it comes to crunch time, I'm still expected to deal with B.

From the sounds of it, a group of six may not be a large enough population to allow for the luxury of specialization - especially if the other three are being asked to handle all of the areas.  If you allow four of them to escape the drug information piece, that means then that three people have to do the drug info work of seven which seems a little imbalanced. 

Additionally, if these folks are all truly pharmacists (rather than pharmacy techs or whatever else), would you be doing the entire team a disservice?  If, for some reason, layoffs are required, how marketable is a person with a narrow focus on drug info or a person with virtually no exposure or practice to drug info?  

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Peter.westley's picture
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Perhaps you could just adjust the balance, rather than going all one way or the other?

That way pharmacists get to do most of what they like but get to keep their hand in on the other parts.

-- Peter

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PaulM's picture

 As an HR Professional with experience in Pharmacy Retail, I would have to say that with 6 people you can't effectively specialize your staff in this method. You would need to have a much larger team in order to execute this. (see the recent cast on team size) The fact is, in a pharmacy, everyone has to have a turn at the undesirable tasks. If you try and specialize you will have a whole host of issues around fairness that you will NOT want to deal with.

In your situation, I would engage those pharmacists who are interested and high performers in each area do some on the job coaching with the others. This offers you two advantages: You build the skill sets of those who aren't particularly skilled in each area, as well as engaging the others in coaching activities which would do wonders for their career development. 

As for the ones that "loathe" certain activities, unfortunately I'm guessing it's a part of their job and would be a they refuse to do the work.  performance issue if they refuse to do the work. Why do they loathe it? are they not adept at that work? do they not see the value in it? is it something they just do not want to do?  You'll have to get to the bottom of this, and then overcome if you want your team to be successful.